The tough game on the “pitch of manliness”
“Black and white. Red and yellow. Everything is simple in football”. Well, that is what King Football would like to think if we want, or are meant to believe his guest appearance in the form of a projection in the boat people project show Stand your Ground. Here fiction and reality, storytelling and documentation run closely alongside one another and the borders between them flow into one another. One thing, however, is clear: the theme of homosexuality in football. This is still a very uncomfortable subject which no one likes to deal with even when it is constantly cooked up in the media.
In the show directed by Reimar de la Chevallerie the boat people project takes up almost an hour between the educational enlightenment and the game. The show is played out in a manner which is close to the everyday lives of the young audience and invites them to confront the subject directly and openly. The cramped space of a changing room allows the director to create a direct “playing field” between storytelling theatre, play scenes and documentary interviews with football fans and players, during which he tracks down the many different minute aspects of prejudice and repression suffered by homosexual athletes in their everyday lives.
Stand your Ground clearly regards itself as a piece of educationally enlightening theatre that has grown out of meticulous research, interviews and the work on the script by Christopher Weiß. It creates performative spaces that play with our customary ways of seeing and our views of society. This is a powerful one-man play that is always conscious of its responsibilities and duties and knows how to put them into practice. It is social and political agitation in the best sense of the word, committed to its message with a clear attitude and emphatic empathy but without moralising.
